Work before going to DVD...

I’ve been doing some reading inside of Sony Vegas 9 and DVD Architect 4.5. I’ve picked up a pretty good feeling to start putting something together. I have some questions on the Vegas side before I render.

The video I have is 1920x1080 recorded on an HD camcorder. Obviously the quality will be less going to DVD as I am not recording to blue ray but I want to render and burn this to as good quality as possible.

I choose MainConcept MPEG-2 to save the file. Now under templates I see “DVD Architect NTSC Video Stream” and “DVD Architect NTSC WIDESCREEN Video Stream” as my options. From the description field I don’t see much of a difference. What should I use?

Should I select on the option “Stretch video to fill output frame size (do not letterbox)” or would that be taken care of with the options above?

When processing AC3 audio file I see “Dolby Digital AC-3 Pro” and I read you must click on custom, go to the “Preprocessing” tab, and change both “Line mode profile” and “RF mode profile” to None to make sure the audio is not too low. However the templates are “Default Template” and “Stereo DVD”, does it matter? They seem to have same description.

I choose MainConcept MPEG-2 to save the file. Now under templates I see “DVD Architect NTSC Video Stream” and “DVD Architect NTSC WIDESCREEN Video Stream” as my options. From the description field I don’t see much of a difference. What should I use?

NTSC Standard Def DVD Video is 720 x 480 pixels. It's 720 x 480 whether 4:3 or 16:9. The only difference is the shape of the pixels.
Something needs to tell the player (or in this case renderer) what shape the pixels are.

That's the difference between the two.

Having created a widescreen project you'll want to use the widescreen template.

DVD+/-R ? It's a matter of what your playbacj device prefers. This is not so much of an issue nowadays as pretty much all players are happy with both.

Can't help on the AC3. I've always left it as standard. Volumes maybe a bit lower than some other DVDs but it's never caused me a problem.